Computational Social Science and Culture in the Age of Social Media

Chris Bail
Duke University

How do civil society groups stimulate viral social media conversations?

Theory of cultural resonance

 

Theory of cultural resonance

A new theory cultural resonance

Cultural Complexity

Cultural complexity

Topic validation

Topics

Coefficient of Discursive Variation

 

Where \( \theta \) is the standard deviation of the membership matrix of organization \( i \)'s posts in the thirty-nine topic categories during the previous week and \( \mu \) is the mean score of the posts across all topic areas during the same time period.

 
 
 
 
 

See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288

Cultural complexity

Cultural Position

Cultural position

Constructing cultural networks

Calculating "cultural betweenness"

 

Modified Djikstra Algorithm for weighted networks:

 
Cultural Betweenness of each organization (i) by day (t):

 
 
 

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828 and the texnets package in R.

The cultural network of Autism Civil Society Groups on Facebook

The cultural network of Autism civil society groups on facebook

Results

Results

TextNets: R Package

Webpage for package (with tutorial) http://github.com/cbail/textnets

Cultural Articulation

Idealized cognitive-emotional current

Real cognitive-emotional currents

Phase shift

 

Where E is the amount of emotional language of organization i at time t and C is the amount of rational language or organization i at time t.

 
 
 
 
 
 

See Bail, Christopher A., Taylor W. Brown, and Marcus Mann. 2017. “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Cognitive-Emotional Currents and Public Deliberation on Social Media.”American Sociological Review, 82(6) 1188-1213

Results

WHAT NEXT?

Do cultural position and cultural articulation interact to produce cultural resonance?

Messaging does not occur in a vacuum/discourses enable and constrain each other

Cultural resonance is episodic; how can we calculate the possibility of cultural change at any given moment?

Solution: culture as a signed network

Constructing signed networks via text

 

But... Some people talk more than others

And... Sentence parsers are not perfect

And... Sentiment analysis is :(

AND NOW…SHAMELESS PLUGS!

Link for 2020 event

Oxford Series in Computational Social Science

 

Thank You!

Data Collection Process

 

Examining different Lag Lengths

 

Cultural Bridges in LGBT Advocacy

Cultural Bridges in Climate Change Advocacy

Cultural Bridges in Organ Donation Advocacy